UK PM to give delayed EU speech this week

BRITISH Prime Minister David Cameron will give his long-awaited speech on the future relationship with the EU this week in London, his spokesman says.

Cameron had been due to deliver the speech in Amsterdam last Friday but was forced to postpone it as he was dealing with the Algeria gas plant hostage crisis.

"On Wednesday, in central London in the morning, the prime minister will give his speech on the European Union," the spokesman told reporters at a regular briefing on Monday. That will be Wednesday night AEDT.

The venue in central London was still being kept under wraps by Downing Street.

Asked why the original intention to hold the speech in another EU country had been shelved, Cameron's spokesman said it was because of a busy week in which he is also travelling to the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

"As you know we were planning to give it in Amsterdam. Unfortunately that didn't prove possible, and Wednesday morning fits best with the prime minister's schedule," the spokesman said.

According to extracts given to the media before the speech was called off, Cameron was to have warned that Britain could drift out of the EU unless the 27-member bloc made changes.

In the grand setting of the former stock exchange in the Dutch city, he was to have said that Britons were tiring of the EU's "lack of democratic accountability".

"If we don't address these challenges, the danger is that Europe will fail and the British people will drift towards the exit," he was to have said.

The pre-released extracts did not, however, contain a widely expected announcement of plans to renegotiate Britain's EU membership and to put the new terms to the British public in a referendum.